<div dir="ltr"><div>Try master pdf editor, this makes you hate pdf's less. Use the old/free one, or you will hate it again.</div><div><br></div><div>I deal with the whole "you need to sign *this* thing" all the time, so I open their crap pdf in master pdf editor, insert a transparent png of my signature, save, and send it back. They never know I didn't reprint, sign, scan, and feed them back whatever. I can do pretty much whatever to most pdf's as people don't lock them down (hint - I do, no one else does).</div><div><br></div><div>If they don't use pdf security, you can do most anything to a pdf in master pdf editor if you've ever used photoshop, gimp, illustrator, inkscape, or whatever. Saves me the hassle of signing dead trees as a silly fad from the last century.<br></div><div><br></div><div>-mb</div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 1:06 PM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <<a href="mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org">plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div>PDF files can only be edited with something like Acrobat or a tool that lets you do that. </div><div><br></div><div>So they’re effectively “read only” by default without the right tools.</div><div><br></div><div>Even then, when you create a PDF file, depending what you use, you can set an option that prevents or allows the text to be selected and copied to the clipboard.</div><div><br></div><div>But just about every OCR app in existence lets you feed it PDF files and get an editable Word or text file back.</div><div><br></div><div>Not to mention there are websites that will OCR a few pages of a PDF file for free.</div><div><br></div><div>(At my last job, they had a client with a couple dozen offices around the country. Someone at each office would grab a stack of invoices and drop them into a scanner every night and scan them; it would save the lot to a big PDF file that they’d upload to an FTP site on our server. I wrote an app that would periodically check for new files and run them through an OCR app to extract data from each invoice and put it into a database. The previous software would scan the entire page and save the results, although we only needed a few fields. Scanning only the parts of the page with the data we were looking for sped things up quite a bit. But the point is that the PDF files their scanners created were pretty useless even with Acrobat since they were just a big batch of scanned images.)</div><div><br></div><div>I think you’re asking the wrong question. Try stating the problem you’re actually trying to address.</div><div><br><div>
<span style="border-collapse:separate;border-spacing:0px;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;line-height:normal"><div>-David Schwartz</div><div><br></div><br></span>
</div>
<div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Aug 10, 2021, at 12:42 PM, Shawn Badger via PLUG-discuss <<a href="mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org" target="_blank">plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a>> wrote:</div><br><div><div dir="ltr">One option would be to turn it into an image which is then put into the pdf. Not impossible to change just more work to change.</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:48 PM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <<a href="mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org" target="_blank">plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">joe--- via PLUG-discuss said on Fri, 06 Aug 2021 16:48:59 -0700<br>
<br>
>How to make a pdf read only?<br>
><br>
>I'm sure I've done this in the past,<br>
>but can't remember how. Searched the<br>
>net but found no solution.<br>
><br>
>Do not want to convert to an image<br>
>but just want a read-only pdf.<br>
<br>
I think it's impossible to make a truly read-only pdf. Somebody could<br>
always open it in Vim and tamper with it, or use one of the several PDF<br>
modification tools to convert it to a form that can be written to. Or<br>
import it into Inkscape, modify it as an image, and convert back to PDF.<br>
<br>
If you mean make it so it's not modifyable in Acrobat, there's probably<br>
a way to do that.<br>
<br>
SteveT<br>
<br>
Steve Litt <br>
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